Stop Hiding: The 100% Tariff Masking America’s Industrial Collapse

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By: Robert Kensington

The new Tesla Roadster stops. Zero to sixty in under a second. It looks like the future. But looking at the supply chain, I see a trap. We are celebrating American engineering genius while ignoring the fact that we cannot manufacture it profitably at scale. The base Performance model lacks the thrusters that grab headlines. It relies on standard, fan-powered suction. This is where the problem lives. If we cannot make the base model affordable, we have no product. China can. They have the state-supported supply chain. They have the R&D incentives. They will build comparable technology cheaper, sooner. This is not a race of imagination. It is a race of industrialization. We lost that race before in the 1980s.

Consider the official narrative. We are imposing a 100% Section 301 tariff on Chinese EVs. We claim this protects domestic production. The data supports the anxiety. Chinese brands captured nearly a quarter of the new-car market in Britain in September. The Jaecoo 7, dubbed the “Temu Range Rover,” was the best-selling new vehicle that month. It is not a niche player. It is a market mover. The tariff blocks the cheap Chinese car from hitting American showrooms. It does not lower the cost of a battery in Detroit. It does not make our factories more productive. It simply hides the gap.

Now look at the subtext. The International Energy Agency reports China is the largest EV manufacturing hub. Forty percent of global electric-car exports came from China in 2024. The cost advantage is stark. Chinese battery pack prices fell by about 30% in 2024. The United States saw a 15% decline. That twenty-point differential is the killer. We had a similar crisis with Polaroid. I sat on that board. We understood digital photography. We could not bring the right product to market. Japan jumped in. We went bankrupt. We have not learned that lesson. Brilliant technology does not guarantee commercial success. We need nimbler companies to take risks. We need tax incentives that actually survive the audit. We need to stop treating tariffs as a substitute for industrial policy. The market will eventually force us to face reality.
Author bio: Robert Kensington, an overseas entrepreneurial veteran with decades of experience in real-economy industrial investment and expansion.